Quotes About Self-delusion

The entire city of Las Vegas—plastic opulence, treasure for the taking, vulgar towers, and cocktail waitresses with improbable breasts—is built on the self-delusion of the Beta Male.

Every time a supermodel divorces her rock-star husband, the Beta Male secretly rejoices (or more accurately, feels great waves of unjustified hope), and every time a beautiful movie star marries, the Beta Male experiences a sense of lost opportunity. The entire city of Las Vegas—plastic opulence, treasure for the taking, vulgar towers, and cocktail waitresses with improbable breasts—is built on the self-delusion of the Beta Male.

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

LIFE is simple. Being is simple. The universe is simple. Complexity arises in ignorance and self-delusion.

When you keep telling yourself a lie, at some point you buy your own cover story, like a CIA spy or something.

To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

She had fooled herself into believing she was living the life she'd always dreamed of living when all she had been doing was hiding from it.

Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'

I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn't want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion.

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did

The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self-delusion can we pretend they are sustainable. Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to). Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year.

You may have known for many, many years that smoking isn't good for you, but you're still smoking. You have become a master of deluding yourself. Direct experience is the only thing that can crush your delusion. If you really want to quit and be free, this is the most important step you can take in that direction.

Shun praise. Praise leads to self-delusion. Thy body is not Self, thyself is in itself without a body, and either praise or blame affects it not.

is clear now that appeasement rested more on self-delusion than on rational calculation, because it necessarily required faith in Hitler's sanity and trustworthiness.

The male ego is a powerful source of self-delusion." That made me laugh. "How do they do it?" I asked. "I don't know, but every single one of them looks in the mirror every morning and sees an Adonis staring back at him. And somehow that carries over into the rest of their lives.

depressive realism. Depression is not the near death experience described by so many, [Kayla Dunn] suggests, but a rebirth in which the new psyche has removed self-delusion. Compared with so-called healthy individuals, depressives are more realistic in their worldview.

Self-delusion is pulling in your stomach when you step on the scales.

As for the myths, take anyone's life and deny that most of it is deliberate self-delusion - an aggrandizement - a mixture of lies and truth, of what was wanted and what was had, producing the necessary justification for having been granted life in the first place. I was struck like a match, Lily wrote. I had no option but to burn. You can put a period after that. Lily did. It was the story of her life.

My old skill at self-delusion overrode my doubts as I told myself that Dexter probably believed in me. I could believe anything then. I still can as long as it is improbable.

Nothing was more tiresome than a candidate who started to believe his own spin.

odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

He who is vain and delights in his own ability is deceived by his inferiors. When he likes to bring forth arguments and kindliness, his inferiors take advantage of his abilities.